exhibition

Death from Above

Hugh Mendes

18.Apr.07 - 05.May.07
Tue-Sat 1:30 - 6:30pm

Private View, 17.Apr.07, 6:30-9 pm

Sartorial Contemporary Art
101A Kensington Church St
London W8 7LN
020 7792 5882
art@sartorialart.com
www.sartorialart.com
Tube Notting Hill Gate, High Street Kensington, Kensington / Chelsea

Sartorial Contemporary Art is delighted to announce a new exhibition of
paintings by Hugh Mendes. Over the past few years, Mendes has become known
for a singular vision based on the mundane and never-ending procession of
text and pictures he finds in newspaper clippings, and especially
obituaries.

Pop stars, dictators, nobodies: just about everyone earns the same number of
column inches on the obituary page, and they are all treated equally by
Mendes. Death and daily news provide a ceaseless parade of subject matter
for the artist, and he paints as if he were attempting to slow the pace of
history. In one, Saddam Hussein looks askance, his shirt collar wide open,
looking half like a bug-eyed crook, half like an ageing playboy. A snapshot
from the trial that led to his death, he looks more vulnerable, touched by
both fear and a greater complexity of emotion than we usually attribute to
the dictator. We may even feel a pang of sympathy, our memory haunted by the
pixilated clips of his rough and clumsy hanging. Half a world away, James
Brown reclines in his soft, luxurious coffin, the headline, ‘The Godfather
of Soul’ rising above his corpse as if the essence of his being were
ascending to heaven.

This sense of dislocation is a strong note in the show. Afloat from any
context, the headline ‘a vengeful God, eager for blood’, seems to address
current events in general, rather than just the state of Iraq , the context
of the words. The picture, a cadaverous figure adorned in the thick folds of
a Galliano dress, looks draped in slabs of bloody flesh. The model, with her
white skin and hard, staring eyes, looks risen from the dead. A collision of
two worlds: fashion and war, violence and luxury, metaphysics and ephemera.
The great touch on this painting is the fragment of a quotation that runs
along the bottom of the picture: ‘ . . . dition in which we live . . . ‘
While the full word is almost certainly ‘condition’, it has been
decapitated, leaving it open to other possibilities: rendition, tradition,
sedition or just ‘dition’, an obsolete word for kingdom or rule. Yet, more
than anything, the headless word emphasizes how Mendes builds his paintings
from a pile-up of fragments.

The exhibition will also include an installation of dozens of newspaper
clippings fastened to a wall of the gallery, a reproduction of a wall in the
artist’s studio. The patchwork of disaster and violence, or, at times, grace
and beauty, creates a powerful counterpoint to the paintings. At once
throwaway and poignant, Mendes mines the everyday to create strange
memorials to the constant spin of history.

Craig Burnett March 2007